The first time I remember that concept was on a scouting trip. I believe it was Tom Brennan, an older scout, who also studied theater. He was teaching us something about comedy. He said, “I met a teacher who told me, if you want to make people laugh, instead of trying to make people laugh, try to make them cry.”
It has been a very difficult thing to learn as an actor, there is as much power in a whisper as there is in a shout. If you want to have people believe that you are angry, don’t get angry, resist getting angry.
The last several years, I have done most of my theatrical work with Theo Ubique Theater company in Chicago. The director, Fred Anzevino would tell us time and time again, “You need to play the opposite.”
It has become almost a mantra. Play the opposite. Play the opposite. So much so that when I have recently had the privilege of working next to Fred as his choreographer, I find that he has given me a lot of freedom. He leaves rehearsal and leaves me all alone. I find that I get stuck, and don’t know where a scene of a song should go, so I end up saying, “Let’s do it one more time, and this time play the opposite.”
It is funny, but it works. I was choreographing “Can That Boy Foxtrot” and it wasn’t working. Danielle and Dana kept trying to make us laugh and it just wasn’t funny. I pulled out the secret weapon and said, “I want you to play the opposite. Just as an experiment, instead of trying to make us laugh, try to make us cry.” They did, and everyone in the rehearsal was on the floor, doubled over in laughter. So often in life, what I learn from art, as a singer, a dancer, an actor, a photographer, or a director, has a lesson to teach me spiritually. This little acting trick has had the same effect.
The last five years of my life, I have been flooded with the academic study of pastoral science, divinity. A friend of mine, Robby Thomas, used to laugh with me, “There’s nothing like Divinity school to beat the faith out of you.” It almost did.
It isn’t that I stopped believing in the Faith. I can argue the details of the tradition with the best of them, Bible, Catechism, Patristics, Councils, Social Doctrine, you name it. Stored away in my brain is enough information that if you give me a question and an internet connection, I’ll have a dozen cross references to support a position of Faith. No problem.
But I lost something in Divinity school. Somewhere in defending my Faith, I forgot that faith is a matter of the heart. I could write an entire paper on the rhetorical use of encomium by Paul on the word Agape – self-giving love, but I forgot what love was. I forgot that faith is as much about the heart, as it is the head.
Play the opposite.
Life is a continual balancing act. What you discover when you go too far in one direction, is that you have to adjust and go the other direction. Nothing made that experience more visceral than back in Hong Kong when Fr. Naylor made me do that Labyrinth.
Play the opposite.
When I started college, I was at the top of my game academically. I had come from one of the best college prep high schools in the country, and I was going master singing and acting. I spent four years learning that you can’t “think” yourself a good actor. You have to work with a different muscle.
Play the opposite
Earlier on this pilgrimage, I had a brief realization that my knees were weakening. The problem is something that I have experienced before. I don’t have very strong quadriceps. They are not as strong as they should be in relationship to my other muscles. The solution was something I learned after three months of physical therapy. I needed to strengthen a different muscle.
Play the opposite.
This has been my first trip to Asia and in eight weeks, my Asian brothers and sisters restored in me, what five years of academics almost killed. For eight weeks, I had to play with my weaker muscle, I had to reverse my tendencies, I had to relearn how to live as a heart-being, in which faith is a love that emerges as a trust-thought from within rather than a concept to be understood, dissected, and represented through words. For me, it was playing the opposite.
I cannot advocate a mere trip to Asia for everyone. If you haven’t noticed in my last few blogs, there is so much willingness to believe, just to believe, in the Asian psyche, that it too needs to find balance within the human person. A human being fully engaged works with his/her entire being, not just the mind, not just the heart, not just the flesh, not just the passions, not just the spirit, not just however-you-want-to-dissect-him/her.
But I can tell you that spiritually, a lot of us are stuck. Something isn’t working. Maybe it’s the routine, maybe it’s the theology, maybe it’s the lack of theology. However you are stuck, I might be so bold to say that you may just overusing a part of who you are, and need to relearn how to exercise your whole being. Working those unused “spiritual muscles can often feel like you are doing something antithetical to what feels right, but that’s OK, there is a reason for this.
Religious faith should not cease attempting to try to understand mystery, it is precisely our attempts to describe life’s mystery that gives us the greatest appreciation for the character of mystery. The deeper we explore the bi-gendered nature of human beings (male-female), the Trinity, the Incarnation, and our divine quality some how experienced through our limited, sinful quality, the more we will appreciate that these lived experiences that defy our explanation, not our experience, are life’s greatest mysteries.
If we look at the cross, we have everything we need to understand the very nature of mystery. The cross intersects the vertical and the horizontal. Well which is it? What makes it a cross? Is it the horizontal or the vertical? Well it is both. You can’t have a cross without the intersection of contraries. Is a human being really just their understanding? Are they really just their passions? It doesn’t feel right to have only one attribute. The attributes must intersect somehow, somewhere.
And they do. But we have to let that happen. We have to let go of our thoughts, and let them intersect with our heart, and sometimes we have to let go of our heart, and think things through a little bit. I don’t know how to tell everyone exactly how that is done, but I can tell you that little trick I learned in acting is a huge help. Play the opposite, and it helps intersect what is otherwise a mystery.
Asia has helped me play the opposite and delve deeply into the mystery of human existence and diversity. It has opened up understanding that I didn’t know I could have, not all of which I know how to write at this point in time. All I know is that, as I leave Asia, it forever will have made a mark on my heart, where my Faith has been rekindled.
If you have downloaded Google Earth onto your computer, you can view the 61 pictorials of parishes and communities that I visited in Asia by clicking here.